


I'll ride the rising tide ('till i find you)

by Alielle (TheKitteh)



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Merpeople, Aquariums, Hyungwon the sea turtle, M/M, Merman!Hoseok, Telepathy, human!kihyun, life in captivity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-17
Updated: 2020-02-17
Packaged: 2021-02-27 19:29:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22771018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheKitteh/pseuds/Alielle
Summary: Hoseok's world has always been limited to what was inside of his home - some plants, a few of his fishy friends and air bubbles. And the humans outside of the glass wall.That's all he ever knew and it would be like that forever.Nothing could change in a limited life as the one he had.It could be worse, he supposed. After all, he had a home - he was looked after, he was fed. It wasn't a bad one.
Relationships: Lee Hoseok | Wonho/Yoo Kihyun
Comments: 4
Kudos: 25





	I'll ride the rising tide ('till i find you)

Bubbles.   
  


Bubbles upon bubbles upon bubbles.

For as long as he can remember, Hoseok has been listening to the ever-present, ever constant burble of bubbles. It’s a sound that has been accompanying him his whole life. A sound that permeates every day and every night, as far as he is concerned. It’s a sound that’s somehow become a comfort over the passage of years. 

Bubbles and the tapping of hands against the reinforced glass.

There are some days where he almost misses the previous glass home (that’s what it’s called - glass - this strange solid translucent thing that separates him from others). The one he lived in some time ago was smaller, yes - smaller and darker - but the human visitors on the other side were more well behaved. Their children, especially; it’s the children's’ behavior that makes all the difference. Back there, the little ones were prone to excited squeals and talking over one another quickly, excitedly - but those were all the soft sorts of sounds all of these humans made so often. They were always muted too, somehow, distorted. Unless he was pulled out for examination every now and then, the water and glass easily swallowed most of the sounds and allowed Hoseok to ignore them completely. 

Then one day, they took him out, put him in something with barely enough water not to let his scales and skin painfully dry out, cramped and even darker than his home; something that kept moving, shaking for hours to no end. His body ached when they finally pulled him out, dunked him into cold, cold water and left him all on his own, confused and feeling lost in a much bigger, brighter space. 

Here, in the new glass home, swarms of people - like before, like back there, there were both old and little ones - visit him. They stand in front of where he lives, and they talk and talk; the little ones tapping on the glass walls with their small hands over and over, yelling and screeching when they catch sight of him. They are louder here or maybe the transparent walls aren’t as thick because Hoseok needs to focus to block those sounds out more than he ever had to. 

They’re louder whenever they see him swim around, whenever he feels like allowing them to see him properly. He tries not to do that too often, but he’s quite big nowadays and the need to stretch out gets overwhelming. 

At least that’s what the men in white say. That he’s fully grown - that’s what they muttered between themselves the last time they hauled him out and put something thin and cold against his tail and chest and shoulders. They said he outgrew their expectations and then they poked around his neck, where his gills closed up and he coughed up water as his body adjusted its breathing ways. They said he’s their pride, even if Hoseok’s uncertain what it actually means. 

Unlike the previous one, this glass home Hoseok’s in now is rather big, stretches quite far - over a raise where it’s more narrow and then further back, wider again. When he’s in a particularly good mood, he likes to swim from one end to the other and back, stretch out and cross the water with two-three flips of his tail. If it happens during the day, the humans that watch him erupt into a storm of noise, flapping their hands fast like seals and making an annoying sound Hoseok’s unable to describe. Lights always bloom between their fingers quickly, as fast as blood from the meat he’s fed and as repetitive. The lights long have stopped bothering him.

All in all, the visiting humans seem to be in awe of him and so they should be. 

Hoseok knows he is a beautiful mer - his tail is slim, strong, the scales dark (darker than the waters that he’s submerged in) with a glimmer to it, perfectly visible and sparkling when the lights hit them just so. The humans seem particularly fond of when he swims across, letting them see all of him. The fins of his tail are beautiful too, flowing like one of those little in-bred fighting fish he sometimes hears from a distance; the fins begin as dark as his whole tail, fading through lighter shades of blues and teals to end in shimmery white. 

The upper parts of his body (the one that looks human sans the gills and the translucent webbing between his fingers) is almost as prettily pale as the tips of his fins; reminds him of the pearls created by mollusks.

Hoseok catches his reflection in the glass walls sometimes, late at night. 

He sees himself, takes in the reflection from his tail to the black hair and no, he doesn’t wonder why the humans on the other side of those walls stare and  _ oooh _ at him. 

\---

The men who come to see him sometimes say he’s a gift. That there are not many like him out there. Hoseok’s not exactly certain what ‘ _ a gift _ ’ is supposed to be, but they always get a sharp glint in their eyes when he’s raised out of his home. He doesn’t think that being this  _ ‘gift _ ’ is a good thing, because they always poke and prod at him, pinch his skin and sometimes draw blood. They take it into shiny little things, put it away and he desperately doesn’t try to think what they do with it.

The ones at the bigger home are worse than the one at the smaller one - here, one day, they had taken something hard to his teeth and smoothed them out, filled his mouth with dust and made him choke. Held him down as he struggled until they were done and all the sharp ridges inside of his mouth were gone.

When they washed his face with water, allowing him a few careful sips, they said it was for his own safety. They started feeding him tiny bits of meat afterward as he was unable to tear into bigger pieces anymore. They put more fish into his home, too. He wasn’t able to hurt them, after all, and it was not like he even wanted to, it was nice to have company. The little fish are terrified at first - of him, of being in his home - but with the passage of days they calm, get used to his presence. They talk to him sometimes, tales of tiny glass homes they were in and the things they saw before they were dunked into his. 

A sea turtle joins them one day. 

His name is Hyungwon, he’s still young in turtle years and his carapace is all wrong. There are ugly cracks in it, something long and shiny keeping the plates together and Hoseok  _ aches _ for the animal. His fingers are gentle when he pets Hyungwon and the turtle tells him the humans found him and sewn him whole a long time ago. He’s been in a small, white space for so long, waiting and healing and finally, the men in white decided he was ready to come into Hoseok’s home. The turtle says kind things about the men that brought him in - they saved him from pain and helped him recover. Says they were gentle, patient. 

Maybe Hoseok has been saved as well? 

The thing is, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t exactly remember a life outside of the glass homes. As far as he can think back, those walls and the constant bubbles and clear, clear water have always been his whole world. Was he created? The fighter fish at the smaller home told him some species are ‘ _ cross-bred _ ’ by the men on the outside, creating some sort of a new creature or animal. But the human men seemed to be awed by him - even if in a cruel, painful sort of way - every time they bid him to come to them. And Hoseok always goes, too, because even if the things they did to him were scary, even if sometimes they hurt, he doesn’t know how to do anything else. 

They beckon him and he listens.

If anything, it’s a chance to breathe in the other air, at least. 

And if he is honest with himself, he likes to hear the sounds outside of the water. Once his body adjusts to the outside, to  _ so much air _ , he always relishes how unmuted everything is. The noises outside of his home are so clear, so different. 

There is no sweet murmur of bubbles on the outside.

There are echoes, though. Clangs and jingles and something like flapping - it’s sort of familiar to the sound manta rays do while crossing the waters. Sometimes, there’s something screechy. Or a strange buzz. The white things the men wear make sounds too - something soft that made him think of sand against his membranes and fingers, a trickle of it against his scales. The men themselves make a lot of noises too - when they do not speak to him directly, they mumble something or other, make soft sounds with their mouths closed. 

He understands them when they speak to him but his mouth is unable to form the same sounds as they do. So they ask and he nods or shakes his head, or laughs or makes pained noises of his own. They’re happy when he communicates with them; he’s happy when their poking doesn’t cause him pain. 

The thing Hoseok doesn't allow the outside men to find out is that he can  _ hear _ them when he wants to. It’s something he discovered about himself when he was still little, when his tail was more of pale blue than the dark one it is now and when his teeth were still naturally blunt in his mouth. There was a young one that helped out, at the smaller home, more delicate than the others, with kind eyes and long hair - a girl, a her (he learned that there are girls and boys, as one of the men explained it when they called him a boy and Hoseok made a confused sound at the word) - and she was so, so gentle. She always looked at Hoseok with curious, wide eyes and one day, her mouth was closed as she was doing something on the other side of the wall and Hoseok realized suddenly that he could hear her voice perfectly, each word loud and clear as if she whispered them directly into his ear.

The stream of her voice was so loud and clear that it surprised him enough that he startled himself so bad he cut his tail on the rocks in laying around in the sand. Blood blossomed in red and pink in the water and he stared at it in wonder, awed by the way it unfurled so pretty and foreign and it took way too long for him to register the sting of pain.

They hauled him up quickly once she noticed, put something tiny and pointed to the gash on his tail and it stung, it hurt and burned as they fixed him and then it didn’t and the blood didn’t flow anymore. 

The girl’s voice rang in his head, scared and small, long after she went away. 

It happened more and more, not just with the girl. And so Hoseok tested his ability cautiously. He’s very careful with it, somehow knowing that letting the men aware that he can hear them when they’re not talking at all would cause him only more aches and unpleasantries. But he finds out that the ones who touched him, who laid their webbing-less fingers on his skin, those he could confuse so easily, poking at them in his own head. 

They always looked around so frantically, doubting their sanity when they heard a voice coming from nowhere.

The downside, it made him more sensitive to pick up the sounds from the outside, despite the glass and the hum of the thing that made the bubbles inside of his home. Sometimes he could hear some of the children, their voices a shrill that caused him to hide in the back where the plants were thicker and taller, hiding out of sight. Sometimes it was one voice, sometimes it was many. When it was many, it hurt - it made his head seem close to bursting, made his eyes sting as if he put one of the sea anemones to them and let their poison run its course. 

As he grew, taller and bigger and smarter, he learned how  _ not _ to listen. How to silence the voices that didn’t belong to him or the fish or Hyungwon and how to hear them only when he wanted to. 

He rarely wanted to, really. The voices never said anything interesting; usually, something about ‘ _ money’ _ , whatever it was or ‘ _ work _ ’ and how little time everyone had. The voices from the visitors were tiring, the voices from the men in white were disconcerting. 

So he chose not to listen, not to hear what they wanted to say to him without speaking at all, and instead, focused on the familiar, sweet sound of bubbles. 

\---

And that’s Hoseok’s life. 

On the other side of the glass, other humans come and go, on the other side of glass, old and young. Day by day by day. Week by week by week. A constant, neverending, exhaustingly boring cycle. 

Nights are his reprieve - it’s when Hoseok’s mind conjures images of things he’s never seen. At night, the lights around dim and things are quiet. Sometimes he swims around a little, stretches himself out wholly, unabashedly, without the noise or the bright flashes or the taping at the glass. Most of the time, however, he curls around the strange stone-like structure the men in white lowered into his home one day, lets his tail rest as he makes himself comfortable. 

At night, he listens to the bubbles. He doesn’t sleep, not exactly. It’s a strange state he finds himself in, semi-aware but with eyes closed until the morning comes and the light flicker brighter and the strange, booming voice causes all the mer animals to stir. 

But as he rests, he always imagines white sands and pink seashells; wakes up yearning for a taste of salt and the cling of it to his scales.

\---

Every day is the same and all in all, Hoseok’s pretty content with his life.

And then, one day, something changes.

**Author's Note:**

> No, I am not that much on a roll, I just had this one stewing in my WIP folder for so long.... 
> 
> Please keep in mind that both the "characters" and "additional tags" will be updated as the story progresses! 
> 
> Anyway, I hereby welcome you all to the merman AU no one asked for. 
> 
> You can find me on everyone's fave bird app [ @alielle ](https://twitter.com/alielle)


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